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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Castledine Electronics The Wizard

Here's another take on the cascaded JFET overdrive design. This has a similar goal to the Catalinbread Sabbra Cadabra in trying to sound like Tony Iommi with a treble booster feeding a tube emulator. The Wizard is...

A new distortion pedal, inspired by Tony Iommi's guitar sound on the early Black Sabbath albums. It is well known that he used a modified Rangemaster to drive his amps, so the same principle was used for The Wizard. The first gain stage is essentially a Rangemaster, using a germanium transistor, but tweaked for a full range boost. That drives a distortion circuit which has been designed to give something of the tone and feel of a Laney Supergroup amp. Obviously, there is no substitute for a full stack at volume, but The Wizard has a similar distortion character and responds well to picking dynamics. 

I've laid this out specifically for a 125B enclosure with top mounted jacks.




13 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Haha, yeah. First transistor is germanium and the rest are J201s. lol

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  2. are there any schematics available tnx

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  3. no need for trimmers for the 201's? thanks!

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    Replies
    1. cool-- thank you very much for your response! love the website- i'm learning a lot just from reading all the comments! lol

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  4. The circuit uses j201. From what I can find the pin out of the j201 is opposite of what's shown (with the flat side facing you g is on the left and d is on the right.) I plan to use 2n5458 as a sub, which has a pin outs opposite of j201. Should I follow the pin out letters or the position as shown? Thanks!

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    Replies
    1. Not sure where you're getting that information. The pinout of the J201 and 2N5458 are the same.

      http://i167.photobucket.com/albums/u160/rocklander/jfet-schemtopinconfig-sm.jpg

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Based on the schematic on FSB this layout has some errors and is missing a couple of components.
    Has this been verified?

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  7. There seems to be two versions of this pedal.
    If you want to make the latest version change the following:

    The 100uf cap connected to the 4k7 should be 47uf and the 4k7 should be 3k9
    All 22k resistors to 10k
    220pf to 3n9
    2n2 to 1n5
    100pf to 470pf

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